The Scandal of Simone de Beauvoir (Pt 2)

How Simone de Beauvoir had sex with her students and lied about it afterwards

This is the second part of a three part series. Part 1 is here.

Bianca

Bianca Bienenfeld was sixteen, a pupil at Lycée Molière, when she first met Simone de Beauvoir, newly appointed to teach the baccalaureate philosophy class. Bienenfeld was mesmerised by her beautiful young teacher, so different from the “boring old man” teaching next door.

The whole package came as a revelation to me. She knew so much about subjects that were so rich and so new to us; her lectures were lively, clear, and well structured… she had everything stored in her mind, in perfect order. (Lamblin, 1996, p. 16)

In early spring 1938, Bienenfeld wrote a note to Beauvoir expressing her admiration. She received an immediate response inviting her to meet. Very soon, Bienenfeld was “floating on a cloud of happiness”, meeting her teacher almost every Sunday morning to stroll around Paris. Her attachment to Beauvoir grew over the next few months, and after she graduated, Beauvoir invited her on a short backpacking trip to Burgundy. Bienenfeld, writing as Bianca Lamblin, reports in her memoir that it was during this trip that she began a sexual relationship with Beauvoir (Lamblin, 1996, p. 31). She was seventeen years old.

By the time 1938 drew to a close, Beauvoir and Bienenfeld were enmeshed in a full-blown love affair (complicated by the fact that Beauvoir was also smitten with Jacques-Laurent Bost, who was himself in a relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz). It was at this point that Sartre inserted himself into the proceedings (Bienenfeld has subsequently suggested that Beauvoir deliberately encouraged her affair with Sartre in order to exert some kind of control over his sexual liaisons). Beauvoir had suggested to Bienenfeld that she should join the essential two for a bit of skiing over the Christmas vacation. The trip went well, and Bienenfeld enjoyed New Year’s Eve with Beauvoir and Sartre, spending the night in their bathtub.

Bienenfeld reports in her memoir that this marked the beginning of Sartre’s romantic pursuit of her. During the winter and spring of 1939, they met in cafés and went out on their own together. She was attracted by his intelligence and charm, writing in her memoir that he was “the master of the language of love” (Lamblin, 1996, p. 39). Sartre soon declared his love, and, despite Bienenfeld’s ambivalence, talk quickly turned to the circumstances in which they would consummate their relationship.

The whole thing turned out to be a disaster. Sartre began the proceedings by announcing that he’d taken another girl’s virginity in the same hotel room the day before. He then undressed in front of Bienenfeld, and washed his feet in the bathroom sink. He refused to draw the curtains when asked, and then mocked Bienenfeld for her shyness. After this display of boorishness, it is entirely unsurprising that Bienenfeld was unable to go through with the act, though she does note in her memoir that he “achieved his goal” in the days that followed. (see Lamblin, 1996, pp. 42-3)

So where was Simone de Beauvoir in all this? In fact, this period marked the beginning of the souring of Beauvoir’s relationship with Bienenfeld. It seems absolutely clear that jealousy lay at the heart of this cooling off. The evidence is in the letters that Beauvoir wrote to Sartre during this period, which show Beauvoir making a concerted effort, disguised as adherence to their pact of total transparency, to undermine Bienenfeld. The four examples that follow are representative:

I don’t know why, I’m cold. Perhaps it’s the fact of having got on so well with Kos.—that always harms Bienenfeld. Perhaps, too, I was expecting something more solid, but find just a little girl, rather lost, too pathetic, and disordered in her thoughts. [September 21, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, pp. 73-4)

She practises mental and manual masturbation all day long, and I explained to her that the latter may be all very well, but the former’s disastrous. I worked away assiduously to persuade her as far as possible to accept a life without us, instead of rejecting it… If she comes back to Paris, it will be a real little cataclysm—a disaster for me. [November 10, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 156)

I’m finding Bienenfeld indescribably burdensome, to the point where a shiver of annoyance sometimes escapes me, or there’s a nuance in my voice, which then require explanations and correctives. [November 11, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 157)

We went upstairs, we went to bed, and she stripped naked saying: ‘I find it ridiculous, putting on a nightie just to take it off again.’ I can’t convey to you the reasonable, sedate quality which this little phrase, uttered in this way, imparted to our transports of passion. It reduced me to a state of bleak frigidity—and frigidity gave way to hatred. It was the first time I’d ever felt that: a real hatred of sleeping with a woman I don’t love. I articulated it to myself even as she was marvelling at the tender expression on my face. She’s all nervous explosions, and the more passion she puts into them the more nervous and clumsy her caresses become. And I was enduring that clumsiness of hers with malicious irony—it couldn’t have been more disagreeable. [December 22, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 226)

It is these passages, and others like them, in Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre that provoked the most consternation among reviewers and commentators when the letters were published in the early-1990s. It is important to keep in mind the broader context here.

The age difference was large. Bianca Bienenfeld was only eighteen years old when these letters were written, Beauvoir was thirty-one, and Sartre was thirty-four, almost twice her age.

Moreover, Beauvoir was still sexually active with Bienenfeld at this point. Indeed, earlier in the November 10 letter, cited above, she had this to say:

We had a passionate night—the strength of that girl’s passion is incredible. Sensually I was more involved than usual, with the vague, lousy idea (I think) that I should at least ‘take advantage’ of her body. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 155)

Needless to say, Bienenfeld had absolutely no idea that Beauvoir and Sartre were writing disparagingly about her in their personal correspondence. In fact, she was devastated when she found out fifty years later with the publication of Letters to Sartre. She had believed until then that Beauvoir had been a friend and ally, but this turned out not to be the case.

A number of defences have been offered for Beauvoir’s behaviour in these years. Let’s consider one of these in relation to Beauvoir’s treatment of Bienenfeld.

In his introduction to Letters to Sartre, Quintin Hoare makes this argument:

[I]t is precisely this blazing, disconcerting truthfulness that forms the bedrock of De Beauvoir’s lifelong passionate relationship with Sartre, giving it its radical edge… Love and ethics themselves were being redefined, not just mores. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. IX)

The first point to make here is the obvious one that there is nothing unusual, or radical, or noble, about a thirty-something man pursuing much younger women for sex. You can dress it up in philosophical finery, tell yourself that you’re forging a new kind of ethics, and it’ll still be the age old story of an older man hitting on women much younger than himself, and hoping he gets lucky.

But, even if this were not true, there is naivety in the suggestion that “truthfulness” is deployed in these exchanges to further the end of a radical ethics. A much more plausible account is that this is truth-telling as a romantic cudgel designed to bring down a love rival. Hazel Barnes, perhaps best known for translating Sartre’s magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, has noted that Beauvoir was a little reticent in providing details about her sexual encounters, arguing that this shows the letters weren’t intended to titillate (Barnes, it must be said, underestimates the ease with which some men can be titillated) (Barnes, 1991, p. 14). There is something to this point, which rather belies the injunction to “tell everything”, but, significantly, Beauvoir seems to have had no such qualms in providing exactly the right sort of detail about her relationship with Bienenfeld to damage her rival in the eyes of Sartre.

Beauvoir knew perfectly well that “telling the truth” could be deployed tactically in order to further some possibly disreputable goal. She made the point herself when discussing her pact with Sartre in The Prime of Life:

Frank speaking is not only, very often, a means of communication but of action too: it isn’t playing fair if, while pretending that no pressure is being brought to bear, you bludgeon someone with an indiscreet truth. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 24)

Well quite.

There seems to be a suggestion lurking in Hoare’s apologetics that Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s commitment to radical transparency functions as a moral get out of jail free card. But, of course, it doesn’t. You don’t escape your obligations to other people just because you’ve got a special pact with your essential person. Probably it’s true that Bienenfeld must have known that she couldn’t expect normal levels of privacy from Beauvoir and Sartre, but she assuredly did not know that she was being disparaged in such offensively personal terms by somebody whom she loved, and whose good faith she was justified in assuming.

Some might think that Bienenfeld was expecting too much from Beauvoir and Sartre, that she must have known she’d always be merely an addition to an established dyad, contingent rather than essential. Certainly, Beauvoir became increasingly irritated that Bienenfeld expected to be treated as an equal in the relationship between the three of them. Hence in one of her letters to Sartre, she told him all about what she called “a big scene”.

We left the Dome, and she began to reproach me for not wanting to leave you to her for 6 days during your leave. Flushing with anger, I told her I couldn’t understand how she envisaged our relations; that she seemed to see the threesome as an exact tripartite division, which astonished me. [November 12, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, pp. 59-60)

The trouble is Bienenfeld was eighteen years old, and getting mixed messages from the two of them. In fact, the same letter that describes the fight over access to Sartre is an object lesson in how to muddy waters, with Beauvoir revealing that she had told Bienenfeld that:

1. They were a threesome, with Beauvoir and Sartre forming the base and Bienenfeld as the "projecting point."

2. Beauvoir loved Bienenfeld as much as Sartre, though she needed Sartre more.

3. Sartre loved both women equally.

There is also evidence in Sartre’s letters to Bienenfeld, published as Witness to My Life, that he was spinning the same line that she was more than merely contingent to them. The two excerpts below are typical of the flavour of his letters to her:

My love, I don’t quite know what to tell you about the Beaver’s [Beauvoir] departure. But there is one thing I do know well, in any case, that our future is your future; there is no difference—and that the Beaver lives in a world in which you are everywhere and always present. [July 1939] (Sartre, 1992, p. 190)

Now listen, I will come back to you. I’m in no danger, I’m the faithful type, and you’ll find me again when the time comes… Nothing can change us, my love, neither you, nor the Beaver, nor I. This is a wretched moment in our lives, but it isn’t the end of our lives. There will be a peace and an afterward. [September 2, 1939] (Sartre, 1992, p. 226)

Given this context, it is not surprising that Bienenfeld believed she was an integral part of a triad, not a contingent other to be discarded on a whim. Hence it was a profound shock to her when she received a “brutal letter” out of the blue from Sartre in February 1940 telling her that the relationship was over:

…it was totally unexpected; all the preceding letters had been warm, loving, romantic. Nothing that had occurred between us could have allowed me to predict such a sudden rupture. I was deeply bewildered, unable to understand… I wondered what to make of all the love letters I had received week after week, one of them just three days earlier, if love could dissolve in an instant like a bad dream. I understood that the feelings Sartre claimed to have had for me were nothing but empty words, a pathetic act. (Lamblin, 1996, pp. 66-7)

Not coincidentally, this rupture marked the beginning of the end of Bienenfeld’s relationship with Beauvoir. The final break occurred just over six months later after the pair took what turned out to be a farewell bike trip visiting churches and chateaux in the Morbihan. After their return to Paris, Beauvoir informed Bienenfeld that she would not be able to see her as often as before, and confessed that she was having an “idyll” with Jacques-Laurent Bost (known to them as “Little Bost”). Bienenfeld was distraught:

Suddenly I was suffocating, sinking… I felt abandoned, humiliated for the second time in a year, torn apart, deserted. The entire marvellous adventure, that attractive three-part structure, collapsed like a house of cards. (Lamblin, 1996, p. 89)

There is little to be said in defence of either Beauvoir or Sartre for their dealings with Bianca Bienenfeld. Perhaps charitably one could point out that Beauvoir did at times show a glimmer of insight into the terrible harm they had inflicted upon the young woman. In one letter, written in the immediate aftermath of Sartre’s brutal dismissal of Bienenfeld, she states quite explicitly that the amount of suffering they had caused was unacceptable (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 285). In another letter, written much later, after she’d reconnected with Bienenfeld at the end of WW2, she has this to say:

I’m upset about Bianca Bienenfeld… she’s suffering from an intense and dreadful attack of neurasthenia, and it’s our fault I think. It’s the very indirect, but profound, after-shock of the business between her and us. She’s the only person to whom we’ve really done harm, but we have harmed her… It’s important to see a lot of her, and I’m going to try because I’m filled with remorse. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 390)

To which, the obvious thing to say is that remorse is the only appropriate response given the series of events we’ve outlined here.

However, there is a question mark about whether Beauvoir is a reliable narrator even when it comes to her own thoughts and emotions. The fact is that Beauvoir lied—a lot. In fact, she was an inveterate liar, especially if one includes lies of omission in the mix. The big lies we already know about. Beauvoir consistently failed to tell the truth about her sexuality, and her relationships with various young women, right until the end of her life. She also lied endlessly to her friends and lovers: she lied to Olga about her love affairs with Bienenfeld and Little Bost; she lied to Bienenfeld about Little Bost, and, perhaps more significantly, about the real nature of her feelings towards Bienenfeld (including, with malicious enjoyment, within the context of sexual intimacy); she lied to the parents of her young female companions; and, even at times, she lied to the authorities (as we’ll see tomorrow).

It is also trivially easy to identify, within the pages of her memoirs and letters, other less serious instances where she failed to tell the truth. For example, just in the time period we’ve been dealing with: she managed to obtain a doctor’s note under a false pretext to allow her to take two weeks off from teaching so she could visit Sartre in Berlin (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 185); she lied to a couple of soldiers, and also to their commanding officer, in an attempt to disguise the fact she was staying in a hotel room with Little Bost (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 299); she plotted to have secret meetings with Sartre so she could spend more time alone with him (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 289); she got herself into a muddle because she’d told friends she was visiting her sister, and then bumped into them, while out with a male friend (Beauvoir, 1965, pp. 160-61); and, during the occupation of Paris, she happily accepted a bicycle as a gift, knowing perfectly well that it had been stolen (Bair, 1990, p. 239).

The point here isn’t that Beauvoir was more untruthful than average, or even that the lies were not on occasion justified, but rather that to the extent that she practised “radical transparency”, it was of an extremely limited kind. She might have consistently told a version of the truth to Jean-Paul Sartre, but she certainly didn’t do so writ large. This fact is thrown into sharp relief in her dealings with the third student with whom she became romantically involved, Nathalie Sorokine.

The final part of this three part series is here.

References

Bair, D. (1990, November 18). Do as she said, not as she did. The New York Times Magazine, 32.

Barnes, H. E. (1991). Simone de Beauvoir's journal and letters: A poisoned gift? Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 8(1), 13-29. 10.1163/25897616-00801003

Blair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A biography. Simon & Schuster.

Contat, M. (2006). Sartre and his other women. Journal of Romance Studies, 6(1-2), 115-124.

de Beauvoir, S. (1965). The Prime of Life. Penguin Books.

de Beauvoir, S. (1992). Letters to Sartre. Arcade Publishing.

de Beauvoir, S. (2009). Wartime Diary. University of Illinois Press.

de Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex. Vintage Books.

Francis, C., & Gontier, F. (1987). Simone de Beauvoir : a life, a love story. St. Martin's Press.

Galster, I. (2001). Beauvoir est exclue de l'université retour sur une affaire classée. Contemporary French Civilization, 25(1), 109-130.

Joseph, G. (1991). Une si douce Occupation: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944. A. Michel.

Kirkpatrick, K. (2019). Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Bloomsbury Academic.

Klaw, B. (1999-2000). Simone de Beauvoir and the other woman: A philosophy of the jealous. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 16(1), 20-32.

Lamblin, B. (1996). Disgraceful Affair. Northeastern University Press.

Lamblin, B. (1998-1999). A disgraceful triangle. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 15(1), 145-155.

Rowley, H. (2007). Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Vintage Books.

Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1939 (S. d. Beauvoir, Ed.). Scribner's.